Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 23 July 2015

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children

Procurement Practices for the Purchase of Hospital Supplies and Equipment: Beacon Hospital and Health Service Executive

2:00 pm

Mr. John Swords:

The area of compliance was really the issue. As referenced in the opening statement, and as mentioned by Mr. Woods a few moments ago, the chief financial officer and I are engaging with senior management and staff of training programmes, and we have met more than 350 people to date. The last meeting took place in Cork just two weeks ago, which had 106 people in attendance. The initiative is also supported by a training programme on the web, in which we ask people to bring the programme back to their own staff and introduce it in that way. The initiative has had the effect of raising awareness. The matter is relevant to Deputy Troy's comment about the 42 reports. In some ways, that has increased, but that is due to awareness. People are more aware of the need to declare non-compliance by way of regulation and that comes from the compliance training that we have done. While it is not good that it exists, it is good that people are aware of it, and that allows us then to address it through procurement. We have also noticed that consistently over the past year and a half we have increased requests for procurement support right across the whole sector, which again conveys that-----

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